OWN owns! Oprah's Next Chapter off to big start

Ratings rebound for Oprah's network?

The two-hour premiere of Oprah Winfrey's new primetime interview series, Oprah's Next Chapter, garnered the network's highest Sunday premiere ever. Is this the first sign of a ratings rebound for the struggling OWN channel?

The Oprah Winfrey Network, OWN, could be on the way to recovering from a bad 2011.

The Queen of Talk's latest series premiered to impressive ratings over the New Year's weekend. The two-hour premiere of Oprah's Next Chapter, which aired on Jan. 1, pulled in 1.1 million viewers.

It was the network's highest-rated Sunday premiere ever. The feat smashed the bar set by Rosie O'Donnell's OWN talk show, which struggled to scrape in 500,000 viewers when it kicked off last year.

The weekend broadcast also became the highest-rated premiere for an OWN series outside of the network's launch weekend. Oprah's Next Chapter ranked just behind the premiere of Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes, which pulled in 1.2 million viewers when it aired on Jan. 1, 2011.

Next Chapter sees O. stepping outside the studio to do what she does like no one else: Conduct groundbreaking interviews. The inaugural episode saw the legendary chat hostess trading dish with newly-engaged rocker Steven Tyler at his home in Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire.

"[Oprah] anticipated her immense fanbase would follow her [to OWN]," media analyst Marc Berman said in November. "But that hasn't been the case. Expectations were through the roof, but ratings aren't close to meeting them."